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ADDRESS 



OF 



PRESIDENT WILSON 

DELIVERED AT WASHINGTON, D. C. 

FLAG DAY 



JUNE 14, 1917 




WASHINGTON 
1917 







0. of D. 
JUL 6 1917 



J\ 






ADDRESS. 



My Fellow Citizens: We meet to celebrate Flag Day because this 
flag which we honour and under which we serve is the emblem of 
our unity, our power, our thought and purpose as a nation. It has 
no other character than that which we give it from generation to 
generation. The choices are burs. It floats in majestic silence above 
the hosts that execute those choices, whether in peace or in war. 
And yet, though silent, it speaks to us, — speaks to us of the past, 
of the men and women who went before us and of the records they 
Avrote upon it. We celebrate the day of its birth; and from its birth 
until now it has witnessed a great history, has floated on high the 
symbol of great events, of a great plan of life worked out by a great 
people. "We are about to carry it into battle, to lift it where it will 
draw the fire of our enemies. We are about to bid thousands, hun- 
dreds of thousands, it may be millions, of our men. the young, the 
strong, the capable men of the nation, to go forth and die beneath it 
on fields of blood far away, — for what \ For some unaccustomed 
thing? For something for which it has never sought the fire before? 
American armies were never before sent across the seas. Why are 
they sent now ? For some new purpose, for which this great fjag 
has never been carried before, or for some old, familiar, heroic pur- 
pose for which it has seen men, its own men, die on every battlefield 
upon which Americans have borne arms since the Revolution? 

These are questions which must be answered. We are Americans. 
We in our turn serve America, and can serve her with no private 
purpose. We must use her flag as she has always used it. We are 
accountable at the bar of history and must plead in utter frankness 
what purpose it is we seek to serve. 

It is plain enough how we were forced into the war. The extraor- 
dinary insults and aggressions of the Imperial German Government 
left us no self-respecting choice but to take up arms in defense of our 
rights as a free people and of our' honour as a sovereign government. 
The military masters of Germany denied us the right to be neutral. 
They filled our unsuspecting communities with vicious spies and con- 
spirators and sought to corrupt the opinion of our people in their own 
behalf. When they found that they could not do that, their agents 
diligently spread sedition amongst us and sought to draw our own 
citizens from their allegiance, — and some of those agents were men 

103778—17 (3) 



connected with the official Embassy of the German Government itself 
here in our own capital. They sought by violence to destroy our 
industries and arrest our commerce. They tried to incite Mexico to 
take up arms against us and to draw Japan into a hostile alliance with 
her, — and that, not by indirection, but by direct suggestion from the 
Foreign Office in Berlin. They impudently denied us the use of the 
high seas and repeatedly executed their threat that they would send 
to their death any of our people who ventured to approach the coasts 
of Europe. And many of our own people were corrupted. Men 
began to look upon their own neighbours with suspicion and to wonder 
in their hot resentment and surprise whether there was any com- 
munity in which hostile intrigue did not lurk. What great nation in 
such circumstances would not have taken up arms? Much as we had 
desired peace, it was denied us, and not of our own* choice. This 
flag under which we serve would have been dishonoured had we with- 
held our hand. 

But that is only part of the story. We know now as clearly as 
we knew before we were ourselves engaged that we are not the 
enemies of the German people and that they are not our enemies. 
They did not originate or desire this hideous war or wish that we 
should be drawn into it; and we are vaguely conscious that we are 
fighting their cause, as they will some day see it, as well as our own. 
They are themselves in the grip of the same sinister power that has 
now at last stretched its ugly talons out and drawn blood from us. 
The whole world is at war because the whole world is in the grip of 
that power and is trying out the great battle which shall determine 
whether it is to be brought under its mastery or fling itself free. 

The war was begun by the military masters of Germany, who 
proved to be also the masters of Austria-Hungary. These men have 
never regarded nations as peoples, men, women, and children of like 
blood and frame as themselves, for whom governments existed and in 
whom governments had their life. They have regarded them merely 
as serviceable organizations which they could by force or intrigue 
bend or corrupt to their own purpose. They have regarded the 
smaller states, in particular, and the peoples who could be over- 
whelmed by force, as their natural tools and instruments of domina- 
tion. Their purpose has long been avowed. The statesmen of other 
nations, to whom that purpose was incredible, paid little attention; 
regarded what German professors expounded in their classrooms and 
German writers set forth to the world as the goal of German policy 
as rather the dream of minds detached from practical affairs, as pre- 
posterous private conceptions of German destiny, than as the actual 
plans of responsible rulers; but the rulers of Germany themselves 
knew all the while what concrete plans, what well advanced intrigues 
lay back of what the professors and the writers were saying, and 



were glad to go forward unmolested, filling the thrones of Balkan states 
with German princes, putting German officers at the service of 
Turkey to drill her armies and make interest with her government, 
developing plans of sedition and rebellion in India and Egypt, set- 
ting their fires in Persia. The demands made by Austria upon 
Servia were a mere single step in a plan which compassed Europe 
and Asia, from Berlin to Bagdad. They hoped those demands might 
not arouse Europe, but they meant to press them whether they did 
or not, for they thought themselves ready for the final issue of arms. 

Their plan was to throw a broad belt of German military power 
and political control across the very centre of Europe and beyond 
the Mediterranean into the heart of Asia ; and Austria-Hungary was 
to be as much their tool and pawn as Servia or Bulgaria or Turkey 
or the ponderous states of the East. Austria-Hungary, indeed, was 
to become part of the central German Empire, absorbed and domi- 
nated by the same forces and influences that had originally cemented 
the German states themselves. The dream had its heart at Berlin. 
It could have had a heart nowhere else! It rejected the idea of 
solidarity of race entirely. The choice of peoples played no part in 
it at all. It contemplated binding together racial and political units 
which could be kept together only by force, — Czechs, Magyars, 
Croats, Serbs, Roumanians, Turks, Armenians, — the proud states of 
Bohemia and Hungary, the stout little commonwealths of the Bal- 
kans, the indomitable Turks, the subtile peoples of the East. These 
peoples did not wish to be united. They ardently desired to direct 
their own affairs, would be satisfied only by undisputed independence. 
They could be kept quiet only by the presence or the constant threat 
of armed men. They would live under a common power only by 
sheer compulsion and await the day of revolution. But the German 
military statesmen had reckoned with all that and were ready to deal 
with it in their own way. 

And they have actually carried the greater part of that amazing 
plan into execution! Look how things stand. Austria is at their 
mercy. It has acted, not upon its own initiative or upon the choice of 
its own people, but at Berlin's dictation ever since the war began. Its 
people now desire peace, but cannot have it until leave is granted 
from Berlin. The so-called Central Powers are in fact but a single 
Power. Servia is at its mercy, should its hands be but for a moment 
freed. Bulgaria has consented to its will, and Roumania is overrun. 
The Turkish armies, which Germans trained, are serving Germany, 
certainly not themselves, and the guns of German warships lying in 
the harbour at Constantinople remind Turkish statesmen every day 
that they have no choice but to take their orders from Berlin. From 
Hamburg to the Persian Gulf the net is spread. 



Is it not easy to understand the eagerness for peace that has been 
manifested from Berlin ever since the sua re was set and sprung? 
Peace, peace, peace has been the talk of her Foreign Office for now 
a year and more; not peace upon her own initiative, but upon the 
initiative of the nations over which she now deems herself to hold 
the advantage. A little of the talk has been public, but most of it 
has been private. Through all sorts of channels it has come to me, 
and in all sorts of guises, but never with the terms disclosed which 
the German Government would be willing to accept. That govern- 
ment has other valuable pawns in its hands besides those I have 
mentioned. It still holds a valuable part of France, though with 
slowly relaxing grasp, and practically the whole of Belgium. Its 
armies press close upon Russia and overrun Poland at their will. 
It cannot go further; it dare not go back. It washes to close its 
bargain before it is too late and it has little left to offer for the 
pound of flesh it will demand. 

The military masters under whom Germany is bleeding see very 
clearly to what point Fate has brought them. If they fall back or 
are forced back an inch, their power both abroad and at home will 
fall to pieces like a house of cards. It is their power at home they 
are thinking about now more than their power ' abroad. It is 
that, power which is trembling under their very feet; and deep fear 
has entered their hearts. They have but one chance to perpetuate 
their military power or even their controlling political influence. 
If they can secure peace now with the immense advantages still in 
their hands which they have up to this point apparently gained, 
they will have justified themselves before the German people: they 
will have gained by force what they promised to gain by it: an 
immense expansion of German power, an immense enlargement of 
German industrial and commercial opportunities. Their prestige 
will be secure, and with their prestige their political power. If they 
fail, their people will thrust them aside; a government accountable 
to the people themselves will be set up in Germany as it has been in 
England, in the United States, in France, and in all the great 
countries of the modern time except Germany. If they succeed they 
are safe and Germany and the world are undone; if they fail Ger- 
many is saved and the world will be at peace. If the}^ succeed, 
America will fall within the menace. We and all the rest of the 
world must remain armed, as they will remain, and must make ready 
for the next step in their aggression; if they fail, the world may 
unite for peace and Germany may be of the union. 

Do you not now understand the new intrigue, the intrigue for 
peace, and why the masters of Germany do not hestitate to use any 
agency that promises to effect their purpose, the deceit of the nations ? 
Their present particular aim is to deceive all those who throughout 



the world stand for the rights of peoples and the self-government 
of nations ; for they see what immense strength the forces of justice 
and of liberalism are gathering out of this war. They are employ- 
ing liberals in their enterprise. They are using men, in Germany 
and without, as their spokesmen whom they have hitherto despised 
and oppressed, using them for their own destruction,— socialists, 
the leaders of labour, the thinkers they have hitherto sought to silence. 
Let them once succeed and these men, now their tools, will be ground 
to powder beneath the weight of the great military empire they will 
have set up; the revolutionists in Kussia will be cut off from all suc- 
cour or cooperation in western Europe and a counter revolution fos- 
tered and supported; Germany herself will lose her chance of free- 
dom ; and all Europe will arm for the next, the final struggle. 

The sinister intrigue is being no less actively conducted in this 
country than in Russia and in every country in Europe to which 
the agents and dupes of the Imperial German Government can get 
access. That government has many spokesmen here, in places high 
and low. They have learned discretion. They keep within the law. 
It is opinion they utter now, not sedition. They proclaim the liberal 
purposes of their masters; declare this a foreign war which can 
touch America with no danger to either her lands or her institutions; 
set England at the centre of the stage and talk of her ambition to 
assert economic dominion throughout the world; appeal to our an- 
cient tradition of isolation in the politics of the nations; and seek 
to undermine the government with false professions of loyalty to its 
principles. 

But they will make no headway. The false betray themselves always 
in every accent. It is only friends and partisans of the German Gov- 
ernment whom we have already identified who utter these thinly 
disguised disloyalties. The facts are patent to all the world, and 
nowhere are they more plainly seen than in the United States, where 
we are accustomed to deal with facts and not with sophistries; and 
the great fact that stands out above all the rest is that this is a 
Peoples' War, a war for freedom and justice and self-government 
amongst all the nations of the world, a war to make the world safe 
for the peoples who live upon it and have made it their own, the 
German people themselves included; and that with us rests the choice 
to break through all these hypocrisies and patent cheats and masks 
of brute force and help set the world free, or else stand aside and let 
it be dominated a long age through by sheer weight of arms and the 
arbitrary choices of self-constituted masters, by the nation which can 
maintain the biggest armies and the most irresistible armaments, — a 
power to which the world has afforded no parallel and in the face 
of which political freedom must wither and perish. 



8 

For us there is but one choice. We have made it. Woe be to the j 

man or group of men that seeks to stand in our way in this day | 

of high resolution when every principle we hold dearest is to be 

vindicated and made secure for the salvation of the nations. We 

are ready to plead at the bar of history, and our flag shall wear j 

a new lustre. Once more we shall make good with our lives and 

fortunes the great faith to which we were born, and a new glory 

shall shine in the face of our people. „„„._„, 

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



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